Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Boddington on the .270 Winchester

In fact the last "deer" I took with a 6.5 was a big cow elk 10 days ago, which weighed around 350 field-dressed. The cartridge was the 6.5 PRC and the bullet the 127-grain Barnes LRX, started at a little over 3000 fps. The cow was quartering strongly to me at around 200 yards. At the shot she dropped and never moved, because the bullet entered the chest just inside the near shoulder, clipped the bottom of the spine and ended up somewhere in the innards beyond.

I had plenty of confidence in that load because have used it before on somewhat smaller deer--and Eileen used a 130-grain TTSX from her custom .308 Winchester to drop another big cow at 250 yards a few years ago, also quartering toward us, and that bullet was loaded to 2850 fps to reduce recoil.

Might also mention something Finn Aagaard wrote years ago in an article titled "Guns of the Settlers," about his first several decades of hunting in Kenya. He started keeping a hunting journal in 1956, and after many years came to the conclusion that the specific big game cartridge didn't matter all that much, because blue wildebeest (supposedly one of the toughest of plains game) ran about as far after being shot through the lungs with any cartridge from the smaller 6.5mms to the .375 H&H. His last sentence reads: “Even today, as it always has been, it is not the rifle or its cartridge that matters so much, but rather the skill and knowledge of the rifleman-hunter who is using it.”